When Ghost Meets Ghost Part 21

"No--second. Come, I say, Miss d.i.c.kenson, two's not much...."

But her remark was less a tobacco-crusade than a protest against too abrupt a production of family history by a family friend. Mr. Pellew felt confident it would come, though; and it did, at about the third whiff of the new cigar.

"I suppose you know the story?"

"Couldn't say, without hearing it first to know."

"About Philippa and Sir Hamilton Torrens?"

"Can't say I have. But then I'm the sort of fellah n.o.body ever tells things to."

"I suppose I oughtn't to have mentioned it."

"I shall not tell anyone you did so. You may rely on that." Mr. Pellew gave his cigar a half-holiday to say this seriously, and Miss d.i.c.kenson felt that his type, though too tailor-made, was always to be relied on; you had only to scratch it to find a Gentleman underneath. No audience ever fails to applaud the discovery on the stage. Evidently there was no reserve needed--a relation of the Earl, too! Still, she felt satisfied at this pa.s.sing recognition of Prudence on her part. Preliminaries had been done justice to.

She proceeded to tell what she knew of the episode of her friend's early engagement to the father of the gentleman who had been shot. It was really a very flat story; so like a thousand others of its sort as scarcely to claim narration-s.p.a.ce. Youth, beauty, high spirits, the London season, first love--warranted the genuine article--parental opposition to the union of Romeo and Juliet, on the vulgar, unpoetical ground of Romeo having no particular income and vague expectations; the natural impatience of eighteen and five-and-twenty when they don't get their own way in everything; misunderstandings, ups-and-downs, reconciliations and new misunderstandings; finally one rather more serious than its predecessors, and judicious non-interference of bystanders--underhanded bystanders who were secretly favouring another suitor, who wasn't so handsome and showy as Romeo certainly, but who was of sterling worth and all that sort of thing. Besides, he was very nearly an Earl, and Hamilton Torrens was three-doors off his father's Baronetcy and Pensham Steynes. This may have had its weight with Juliet.

Miss d.i.c.kenson candidly admitted that she herself would have been influenced; but then, no doubt she was a worldling. Mr. Pellew admired the candour, discerning in it exaggeration to avoid any suspicion of false pretence. He did not suspect himself of any undue leniency to this lady. She was altogether too _pa.s.see_ to admit of any such idea.

The upshot of the flat episode, of course, was that Philippa "became engaged" to her new suitor, and did _not_ fall out with him. They were married within the year, and three months later her former _fiance's_ father died, rather unexpectedly. His eldest son, coming home from Burmah on sick-leave, died on the voyage, of dysentery; and his second brother, a naval officer, was in the autumn of the same year killed by a splinter at the Battle of Navarino. So by a succession of fatalities Romeo found himself the owner of his father's estate, and a not very distant neighbour of Juliet and his successful rival.

It appeared that he had consoled himself by marrying a Miss Abercrombie, Miss d.i.c.kenson believed. These Romeos always marry a Miss Something; who, owing to the way she comes into the story, is always on the top-rung of the ladder of insipidity. n.o.body cares for her; she appears too late to interest us. No doubt there were several Miss Abercrombies on draught, and he selected the tallest or the cleverest or the most musical, avoiding, of course, the dowdiest.

However, there was Lady Ancester's romance, told to account for the languid intercourse between the Castle and Pensham Steynes, and the non-recognition of one another by Gwen and the Man in the Park. Miss d.i.c.kenson added a rider to the effect that she could quite understand the position. It would be a matter of mutual tacit consent, tempered down by formal calls enough to allay local gossip. "I think Miss Torrens has stopped," said she collaterally; you know how one speaks collaterally? "Shall we walk towards the house?"

Then the Hon. Percival made a speech he half repented of later; _videlicet_, when he woke next morning. It became the fulcrum, as it were, of an inexplicable misgiving that Miss d.i.c.kenson would be bearing the light worse than ever when he saw her at breakfast. The speech was:--"It's very nice out here. One can hear the Don at Covent Garden.

Besides ... one can hear out here just as well." This must have been taken to mean that two could. For the lady's truncated reply was:--"Till you've finished your cigar, then!"

Combustion was lip-close when the cigar-end was thrown away. The reader of this story may be able to understand a thing its writer can only record without understanding--the fact that this gentleman felt grateful to the fine moonlight night, now nearly a _fait-accompli_, for enhancing this lady's white silk, which favoured a pretence that she was only reasonably _pa.s.see_, and enabled him to reflect upon the contour of her throat without interruption from its skin. For it had a contour by moonlight. Well!--sufficient to the day is the evil thereof; daylight might have its say to-morrow. Consider the clock put back a dozen years!

"Oh yes, he's asleep still, but I've seen him--looked in on my way down.

Do you know, I really believe he will be quite fit for the journey to-morrow. He's getting such a much better colour, and last night he seemed so much stronger." Thus the last comer to the morning-rally of breakfast claimants, in its ante-room, awaiting its herald. Miss Irene Torrens is a robust beauty with her brother's eyes. She has been with him constantly since she came with her father three weeks ago, and the two of them watched his every breath through the terrible day and night that followed.

"Then perhaps he will let us see him," says Lady Gwen. "At last!"

"You must not expect too much," says Miss Torrens. She does not like saying it, but facts are overpowering. Her brother has exacted a pledge from her to say nothing, even now, about his blindness--merely to treat him as weak-eyed temporarily. He will pa.s.s muster, he says--will squeak through somehow. "I can't have that glorious girl made miserable," were the words he had used to her, half an hour since. This Irene will be all on tenterhooks till the interview is safely over. Meanwhile it is only prudent not to sound too hopeful a note. It is as well to keep a margin in reserve in case the performance should fall through.

Irene's response to her brother's words had been, "She is a glorious girl," and she was on the way to "You should have seen her eyes last night over that Beethoven!" But she broke down on the word _eyes_. How else could it have been? Then the blind man had laughed, in the courage of his heart, as big a laugh as his pitiable weakness could sustain, and had made light of his affliction. He had never given way from the first hour of his revival, when he had asked to have the shutters open, and had been told they were already wide open, and the July sun streaming into the room.

It was the Countess who answered Irene's caution, as accompaniment to her morning salute. "We are not to expect _anything_, my dear. That is quite understood. It would be unreasonable. And we won't stop long and tire him. But this girl of mine will never be happy if he goes away without our--well!--becoming acquainted, I might almost say. Because really we are perfect strangers. And when one has shot a man, even by accident...." Her ladys.h.i.+p did not finish, but went on to hope the eyesight was recovering.

"Oh yes!" said Irene audaciously. "We are quite hopeful about it now. It will be all right with rest and feeding up. Only, if I let you in to see him you _will_ promise me, won't you--not to say a word about his eyes?

It only frightens him, and does no one any good." Of course, Miss Torrens got her promise. It was an easy one to make, because reference to the eyes only seemed a means towards embarra.s.sment. Much easier to say nothing about them. Gwen and Miss Torrens, very _liees_ already, went out by the garden window to talk, but would keep within hearing because breakfast was imminent.

More guests, and the newspapers; as great an event in the early fifties as now, but with only a fraction of the twentieth century's allowance of news. Old General Rawnsley, guilty of his usual rudeness in capturing the _Times_ from all comers, had to surrender it to the Hon. Percival because none but a dog-in-the-manger could read a letter from Sir C.

Napier of Scinde, and about Dr. Livingstone and Sekeletu and the Leeambye all at the same time. All comers, or several male comers at least, essayed to pinion the successful captor of the _Times_, thirsting for information about their own special subjects of interest. No--the Hon. Percival did _not_ see anything, so far, about the new Arctic expedition that was to unearth, or dis-ice, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_; but the inquirer, a vague young man, shall have the paper directly.

Neither has he come on anything, as yet, about a mutiny in the camp at Chobham. But the paper shall be at the disposal of this inquirer, too, as soon as the eye in possession has been run down to the bottom of this column. In due course both inquirers get hold of corners at the moment of surrender, and then have paroxysms of polite concession which neither means in earnest, during which the bone of contention becomes the prey of a pa.s.sing wolf. Less poetically, someone else gets hold of the paper and keeps it.

The Hon. Percival really surrendered the paper, not because his interest in Lord Palmerston's speech had flagged, but because he had heard Miss d.i.c.kenson come in, and that consideration about her endurance of the daylight weighed upon him. On the whole, she is standing the glare of day better than he expected, and her bodice seems very nicely cut. It may have been an accident that she looked so dowdy yesterday morning. He and she exchange morning greetings, pa.s.sionlessly but with civility. The lady may be accounting a _tete-a-tete_ by moonlight with a gentleman, an hour long, an escapade, and he may be resolving on caution for the future. By-the-by, _can_ a lady have a _tete-a-tete_ with another lady by moonlight? Scarcely!

Mr. Norbury, the butler, always feels the likeness of the breakfast rally to fish in a drop-net. If he acts promptly, he will land his usual congregation. He must look in at the door to see if there is a quorum. A quarum would do. A cujus is a great rarity; though even that happens after late dances, or when influenza is endemic. Mr. Norbury looked in at the rally and recognised its psychological moment. More briefly, he announced that breakfast was ready, while a gong rang up distant sheep astray most convincingly.

Adrian Torrens, too weak still to show alacrity in waking, hears the sound and is convinced. How he would rejoice to join the party below! He knows _that_, in his sleep; and resolves as soon as he can speak to tell Mrs. Bailey the nurse he could perfectly well have got up for breakfast. Yet he knows he is glad to be kept lying down, for all that.

He wakes cheris.h.i.+ng his determination to say this to his tyrant, and is conscious of the sun by the warmth, and the unanimity of the birds. He knows, too, that the cas.e.m.e.nt is open, by the sound of voices in the garden below. His sister's voice and another, whose owner's image was the last thing human he had seen, with the eyes that he dared not think had looked their last upon the visible world when the crash came from Heaven-knows-where and shut it out. He could identify it beyond a doubt; could swear to it, now that he had come to understand the real story of his terrible mishap, as the first sound that mixed with his returning life, back from a painless darkness which was a Heaven compared to the torture of his reviving consciousness. It was strange to be told now that at that moment the medical verdict had been given that he was dead.

But he could swear to the voice--even to the words! What was it saying now?

"You may rely on me--indeed you may--to say nothing about the eyes. He will be just able to see us, I suppose?"

"He will hardly recognise you. How long was it altogether, do you think?"

"At Arthur's Bridge? Five minutes--perhaps less."

"He took a good look at you?"

"I suppose so. I think he did, as soon as he had got the dog chained. Oh yes--I should say certainly! I fancied he might have seen me before, but it seems not."

"He says not. But you were not out when he went to Konigsberg."

"Oh no--I had quite a long innings after that.... Well!--it _does_ sound like cricket, doesn't it? Go on."

"Oh--I see what you mean. What a ridiculous girl you are! What was I saying!... Oh, I recollect! That was just after he graduated at Oxford.

Then he went to South America with Engelhardt. He really has been very little at home for three years--over three years--past."

"We shall see if he knows me. I won't say anything to guide him." Then he heard his sister's voice reply to the speaker with words she had used before:--"You know you must not expect too much." To which Lady Gwendolen reiterated: "Oh, you may trust me. I shall say nothing to him about it.... Oh, you darling!" This was to Achilles, manifestly. He had become restless at the sound of conversation below, and had been looking round the door-jamb to see if by any chance a dog could get out. The entry of the nurse a moment since, with a proto-stimulant on a tray, had let him out to tear down the stairs to the garden, rudely thrusting aside the n.o.ble owner of the house, out of bounds in a dressing-gown and able to defy Society.

No lack of sight can quench the image in its victim's brain of Achilles'

greeting to the owners of the two voices. His sister has her fair share of it--no more!--but her friend gets an accolade of a piece with the one she received that morning by Arthur's Bridge, three weeks since. So his owner's brain-image says, confirmed by sounds from without. He is conscious of the absurdity of building so vivid and substantial a superstructure on so little foundation, and would like to protest against it.

"Good-morning, Nurse. I'm better. What is it?--beef-tea. Earls' cooks make capital beef-tea. On the whole I am in favour of Feudalism. Nothing can be sweeter or neater or completer--or more nouris.h.i.+ng--than its beef-tea. Don't put any salt in till I tell you.... Oh no--_I'm_ not going to spill it!" This is preliminary; the protest follows. "Who's talking to my sister under the window?... that's her voice." Of course, he knew perfectly well all the time.

The nurse listens a moment. "That's her ladys.h.i.+p," says she, meaning the Countess. Gwen's voice is not unlike her mother's, only fuller. "They are just going in to breakfast. The gong went a minute ago."

Now is his time to condemn the tyranny which keeps him in bed in the morning and lying down all day. "I _could_ have got up and gone downstairs, Mrs. Bailey, you know I could."

Mrs. Bailey pointed out that had this scheme been carried out a life would have been sacrificed. She explained to a newcomer, no less a person than the Earl himself, that Mr. Torrens would kill himself in five minutes if she did not keep the eyes of a lynx on him all the blessed day. She is always telling him so without effect, he never being any the wiser, even when she talks her head off. Patients never are, being an unmanageable cla.s.s at the best. A nurse with her head on ought to be a rarity, according to Mrs. Bailey.

The image of the Earl in the blind man's mind is very little helped by recollection of the few occasions, some years ago, on which he has seen him. It becomes now, after a short daily chat with him each morning since he gained strength for interviews, that of an elderly gentleman with a hesitating manner anxious to accommodate difficulties, soothing an unreasonable race with a benevolent optimism, pouring oil on the troubled waters of local religion and politics, taking no real interest in the vortices into which it has pleased G.o.d to drag him, all with one distinct object in view--that of adding to his collections undisturbed.

That is the impression he has produced on Mr. Adrian Torrens in a dozen of his visits to his bedside. His lords.h.i.+p has made it a practice to look in at his victim--for that is the way he thinks of him, will he nill he!--as early every day as possible, and as late. He has suffered agonies from constant longings to talk about his Amatis or his Elzevirs or his Pet.i.tots, checked at every impulse by the memory of the patient's blindness. He is always beginning to say how he would like to show him this or that, and collapsing. This also is an inference of Mr. Torrens, drawn in the dark, from sudden hesitations and changes of subject.

"How are we this morning, Nurse?" On the mend, it seems, being more refractory than ever; always a good sign with patients. But we must be kept in bed, till midday at any rate, for some days yet. Or weeks or months or years according to the degree of our intractability. The Earl accepts this as common form, and goes to the bedside saying sum-upwardly:--"No worse, at any rate!"

"Tremendously better, Lord Ancester! _Tremendously_ better, thanks to you and Mrs. Bailey.... Catch hold of the cup, Nurse.... Yes, I've drained it to the dregs.... I know what you are going to say, my lord...."

"I was going to say that Mrs. Bailey and I are not on the same footing.